Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Transportation topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Teacher: chronic bus delays left La Familia students arriving up to 100 minutes late; board urged to publish fixes
Summary
A La Familia High School teacher told the CVUSD board that buses repeatedly arrived 5–30 minutes late and on one day students did not arrive until 8:40 a.m., and asked the board to publicly report steps and measurable goals to fix transportation reliability.
At the June 25 Coachella Valley Unified School District board meeting, a La Familia High School teacher told trustees that chronic bus delays routinely cost students instructional time and asked the board to require public reporting and measurable goals to address the problem.
"During the last school year, there was not a single day when all buses serving our students arrived before the start of school at 7:00 a.m.," the teacher, Jennifer Cassal, told trustees, summarizing data collected by staff at her school. She said the school logged at least 49 school days when a bus arrived at or after 7:25 a.m., with the worst day seeing students arrive at 8:40 a.m. "If students cannot get to school before class begins and cannot leave school in a timely manner at the end of the day, they do not have the same opportunity to learn as their peers," Cassal said.
Cassal asked the board to direct the district to publicly report on the transportation challenges affecting La Familia, including steps being taken, and to set measurable goals for improvement. She noted afternoon pickups were also frequently delayed and said that these disruptions compound achievement gaps.
Trustees and the superintendent acknowledged the problem and described actions already underway: the district has a new transportation director, staff held an emergency meeting about bus air conditioning and maintenance for summer field trips, and trustees requested a more transparent tracking dashboard so parents and the board could view routes and on‑time performance. Vice President Garcia specifically asked whether the district’s tracking system could be adapted into a public dashboard showing which routes are consistently late.
What happens next: trustees asked staff to follow up with a report or dashboard options that would allow parents and the board to see route‑level on‑time performance and incident causes; no formal timeline was set during the meeting.
